Title: Five Ways In Which Jack Harkness Regained His Memory
Author: Jewels Email: fanfic (at) b-jewelled.co.uk
Disclaimer: BBC's. N'mine.

1.

The bottles turned up almost by accident, found dumped with a load of medical waste from around the 52nd Century, on the roof of an office building in central Cardiff. They were neatly tag-coded and labelled in a language only Jack could understand, and that Toshiko could probably have translated, given enough time. But he had secreted them in a pocket when he had spied the symbols that spelt out the drug’s name, Memex, and had waited until the team had gone home for the night before rummaging around in Owen’s medical supplies for a hypodermic.

He was sitting in his office, rolling the vial he had chosen between a thumb and forefinger, staring at the pale green liquid inside, unexpectedly frightened by the option presented to him, the choice of whether to recall or to continue forgetting, and, of course, that was when Ianto chose to walk in.

The man glanced up in surprise from the file he had been bringing in for Jack to sign, and stared at Jack, at the neatly packaged syringe still unopened on the desk, and the glass vial in Jack’s hand.

Jack glared at him in irritation. “Don’t you ever go home?” His voice lacked any real venom. He rather hoped that Ianto didn’t hear the unsettled note he could hear in his own voice.

“I didn’t think that was quite your style, sir,” Ianto said, evenly, gesturing with a fractional jerk of his head towards the Memex.

“It’s not,” Jack said, tiredly, setting the vial down on his desk. “It’s not whatever you think it is. Go home, Ianto.”

Ianto ignored him, dropping into the seat opposite him at the desk, file forgotten in his hands, and stared at him. “What is it then?” When Jack frowned at him, Ianto had the grace to look annoyed. “Or are you going to be your usual mysterious self and give me an explanation couched in sentences that don’t actually mean anything?”

Jack couldn’t help but feel a small smile tug at his mouth. He gestured expansively to the Memex and syringe and said, “The answer to the question that used to be all that drove me forward. Not the biggest question in my life anymore, oddly enough. Strange how things change.”

Ianto picked it up, staring at the blocky characters that almost looked like they could have been written in English, and Jack wondered what he would say if he knew that they had evolved from the Roman characters that people in this little nation state used like they owned them.

“And in an explanation that isn’t totally incomprehensible?” Ianto asked, holding it up to the dim light of the hub, examining the contents.

“Two years in a bottle.” Jack glanced away at Ianto’s sudden, sharp look. Memory loss seemed like such a petty secret in comparison to being a time traveller born three thousand years ahead of this century, perpetually undying, and obsessed with finding the a man that Torchwood was specifically chartered to defend against. “It’s a memory unblocker. Two years of my life are missing and I don’t even know why. Quick shot of that,” He nodded to the vial, “And all is revealed.”

Ianto looked thoughtful. “Is it dangerous?”

Jack stilled, eyes narrowed, watching him carefully. “Very probably.”

“You probably shouldn’t be alone then,” Ianto held out his hand for the syringe. “I’ve seen what happens to some people after they’ve shaken off Retcon. We’ve had to have a couple committed, remember? I’m guessing suddenly uncovering two years of memory isn’t going to be easy.”

It’ll probably kill me, Jack thought, but instead said, “You don’t have to do that. You really shouldn’t.”

“I know,” Ianto stood up again, held out his hand for the syringe, and Jack belatedly realised that Ianto didn’t just intend to standby and watch, but actually help. He felt oddly touched, and maybe a little relieved. “But I suppose no one deserves to lose two years of their life.”

Jack heard the not even you that Ianto left unvoiced, and simply held out his arm, unable to find the strength to even smile.

2.

He came to, the unnaturally warm metal of the deck pressed against his back, his head cradled in someone’s lap, with inhumanly warm fingers threaded through his hair, resting against his scalp, his face. His first immediate thought was that whatever he’d drunk the night before, it was probably best to have it classified as medically hazardous, but then he opened his eyes to a familiarly organic-looking ceiling, with three worried faces staring down at him that he recognised, and one that he didn’t.

Owen was wearing the expression that Jack had come to learn was concern for a patient’s welfare, hidden by the need not to seem so weak. “You didn’t tell us,” he said, tightly, “That you knew the Doctor.”

Gwen looked confused. “Doctor…?”

“That’d be me,” the stranger said, cheerfully.

Jack would have leapt to his feet and shaken the Doctor, throwing the questions that he’d been desperate to ask for so many years, but for some reason, his body wasn’t responding to his orders. It took a great deal of effort, garbled sounds and phlegm, but he managed to grind out the phrase, “What… happened…?”

Tosh looked uncomfortable. “The alien we were chasing. That natural defence mechanism it had seemed to scramble your nerves. Then the Doctor showed up, says he was chasing the same creature, and insisted we bring you in… uh… here.”

The Doctor was looking down at Jack, a little sadly now, “The shock reset your mental pathways.” Jack felt the Doctor’s fingers drum on his scalp in an oddly soothing gesture. “I’m guessing it had the effect of reversing any mental programming you underwent in the past, am I right?”

His body was slowly starting to wake up, it seemed, and so it was quite easy for Jack to say, in a tortured tone, “Oh, fuck me,” as he cast his mind back and found that the Doctor was right, and those two blank years were now a riot of memory, sense and feeling.

Gwen had apparently not been moving along with the conversational flow. “I’m sorry, Doctor… what…?”

“Not what,” the Doctor said, giving her a smile, “Who.”

“I don’t understand,” Gwen admitted, her gaze sliding to the other members of her team.

“I remember,” Jack said, and then his voice choked up with anger. "You were the one who took those memories from me in the first place, you selfish bastard!”

3.

Jack wasn’t exactly sure how he’d managed to get so many versions of himself in the same room at the same time, but he supposed that a lifetime of playing hitchhiker through the timeline, combined with overly inquisitive 21st Century types who didn’t know that ‘put the shiny metal thing down, Tosh, before you get us all killed’ wasn’t just a cheery office joke, probably hadn’t helped.

The wonders of life extension in his own time meant that though all the versions of himself varied very little in appearance, even though their relative-chronological ages were different by decades in some cases.

“I suppose,” one version of himself was holding forth, wearing the uniform of a temporal maintenance engineer (which was the public name that was assigned to Time Agents at the time of his training), “That we’ve all been through this many times before.”

“Yes,” chorused roughly three quarters of the assembled mass. Disconcertingly, Jack realised he wasn’t in that group.

“How come the rest of us don’t remember it yet?” His past self from around the time he’d conducted that con on Silvaris Minor (the pink jumpsuit was a big giveaway), looked rather disgruntled.

“That’d be because he’s the one that manages to get his memory back.”

Jack realised with a start that at least five of his selves were staring at him. “Wait, what?”

“Yeah,” What looked to be his oldest self looked faintly amused. “It took me a lifetime to set up this temporal convergence, and it’s all for your benefit, so don’t look so ungrateful. Getting this lot,” he jerked a hand around the area, “All here at the same time was just a bit of a cock up that I’ve had to live through several dozen times.”

“Mother would be so proud,” A slightly younger version of himself smirked. “She always said I was hopeless at the details.”

“We know,” everyone said, in unison.

“Fuck,” a voice said somewhere, “Every time, I say that.”

“Anyway,” interrupted the older version of himself, “I’ve waited decades to get to say this instead of listen, so shut up and pay attention. I’ve got the nanos to unscramble my brain, but of course injection will kill me, so it has to be you, and it has to be you before certain events happen which you certainly understand that I can’t tell you because you are not an idiot, correct?”

“Sure,” Jack said, determined to just go with it for now. “But how come the ones that come before me don’t remember.”

“Oh,” Older Jack waved a hand, unconcerned. “That’s because after I perform this little bit of impromptu surgery on your cerebrum, the rest of me overpower them and forcibly wipe their memories. It takes a little practice to figure out how to configure the nanos, after all.”

The younger Jacks reacted with rather understandable alarm.

Jack felt distinctly lightheaded. “So you’ve been experimenting on me throughout my timeline?”

“Waste not, want not. Now hold still,” The older Jack produced what looked like a fast absorption drug patch, but Jack knew that it would be coated in nanobots. “This is really going to hurt.”

4.

It was a history book that eventually gave him the answers to his questions, and, rather insultingly, it was a book for children. It had been found in a secondhand bookshop, and had probably fallen through the Rift three hundred or so years earlier. Jack had picked it up while wandering through the streets, startled at finding a Rift-delivered artefact so easily, and had decided to give it a quick read through to satisfy his own curiosity before he handed it over to be filed away. Years of training and experience really should have taught him to ignore such impulses by now.

The Torchwood Institute, the title read, The Biography of Inexorable Change. It was written in a language that seemed to be an offshoot of the sort used about a billion years or so in Earth’s future, that Jack had been forcibly taught when the AI in control of his ship had lost every last one of its silicon marbles, and dropped him a little wide of his aim of mid 37th Century AlphaCent.

It was rather interesting; especially the fact that there was a whole chapter on himself. It described his life, from his birth to Creché Harkness, to his early career in the Time Agency, itself a surreptitious branch of the Institute in his original time, three thousand years hence, to what he had done for two years that had been necessarily erased, and then described some of his wanderings and his more entertaining anecdotes that Jack was sure he would only ever repeat while well and truly out of his skull on hypervodka. The book told all the details in three hundred pages of small print, photographs and illustrations. And then, helpfully, it expounded in earnest detail exactly what would be happening afterwards.

He read it slowly, thoroughly, three times through, and when he was finished, he quietly closed the book, set it in a metal waste paper basket, and vaporised it with a sonic gadget that they’d found six months earlier. The noise brought everyone running from their desks into his office, in time to see him opening the small bottle of Retcon that he kept in his desk drawer. Gwen said something in Welsh that he was given to understand was inappropriate to repeat in polite company.

He looked at them, and laughed, and wondered how exactly they would react if they knew what he did now. “If you stare into the abyss,” he said, with a manic grin, ignoring their startled and slightly frightening expressions, “The abyss stares back.”

He swallowed the Retcon dry, and found himself giggling.

5.

He’d missed the 51st Century. He had a particular fondness for the 20th and 21st Centuries of Earth’s time, perhaps out of necessity considering he’d spent so much of subjective time there, but there was something about his own time, with its clean, unpolluted air, the atmosphere carefully restored through hundreds of years of engineering the biosphere and technology. He’d missed the great flotation habitats that criss-crossed the sea, the convenience of transfer tech that meant it was minutes to cross continents.

He hadn’t missed the coffee though, he thought, as he sipped from the mug in his hands. True coffee plants had died out thousands of years ago, and the re-engineered ones were decaffeinated by design. He felt a brief moment of longing for the rich taste and scent that had greeted him in the mornings when Ianto Jones had brought him a cup first thing after arriving at work. If he’d felt generous, Ianto would have offered him a ginger biscuit from his own stash as well.

“You won’t be saying long,” The Supervisor said, turning away from the view out of the gargantuan window, which was looking out over the great Cobalt Pyramid. Once upon a time, the spot where the Pyramid stood had been called Roald Dahl Plas, and then technology had advanced, the world had moved on, the Institute had become a powerful force, and the Rift had been contained and brought under control for ‘the greater service of Humanity’. The landmass that had been Britain had been practically merged into continental Europe with land extensions now, and the Institutes lands extended miles out into what had used to be sea.

“I met your ancestor, you know,” he said, conversationally, sipping the coffee again. “I’m surprised that in three thousands years, you keep using variations on the same name. I think it’s some effect of the Rift. I think your whole family has been eternally altered and changed.”

Gwendolyn, the very spitting image of her ancestor, smirked and took a seat on the couch next to him. “You’re one to talk. The history of Captain Jack is the history of Torchwood.”

“Stop,” he said, feigning embarrassment. “You’re flattering me.” He stared into the surface of the coffee. “I don’t suppose you’ve done something stupid like trying to poison me, have you?”

“Oh no,” Gwendolyn shook her head. “All that’s in there is a delicious cocktail of HV-154.”

“Generous of you,” he said, slowly, sipping the coffee again. Thinking about it, he could detect the faint taste of almonds that the chemical was derived from. “But why now? And why go to the trouble of sending a retrieval team after me in the middle of the Hub? You gave the Torchwood of my era quite a shock.”

Gwendolyn raised her eyebrow, and he realised belatedly what he’d said. He really had taken to considering the 21st Century ‘his’ time. “You think of it as home, now?” she asked.

He looked away from her and out of the window at the wonderful 51st Century. This was his home. Here was where he’d grown up, where he’d learnt his own values and culture, where everyone thought like him, where people didn’t have stupid ideas about what sex should be about, where people knew who the aliens were, where genes and space and time could be manipulated like clay. This was home, where people weren’t trapped into small ideas, quaint labels and idiotic preconceptions. This was the First Great and Bountiful Human Empire.

So the 21st Century was… what?

“It had to be,” he said, slowly. “I would have gone mad otherwise.”

“You still will.”

“Ah, that’s what you meant. You’re sending me back.” Jack gave Gwendolyn a long, regarding look. “So why unblock my memory?” He held up the mug in question.

“Because it was time,” Gwendolyn sighed. “And it needed to be done. You’ll need to know what happened then. Otherwise, the whole Universe will be at stake.”

“Makes a change from it just being the whole planet then,” Jack said, faintly annoyed.

Gwendolyn laughed, and it was as genuine a laugh as her ancestor’s. “Sorry, Jack. But like I said, your history is the history of Torchwood. And Torchwood is far more important than you ever could have imagined.”